It's extremely lonely in a fandom where there's an absolutely overwhelming non-canonical majority view that you don't happen to share.
It really is. Fortunately, I managed to carve out a little niche and meet some great people.
FK is the polar opposite. No one agrees about anything in FKdom, hardly even baseline canon. :-)
:) What I remember from my mailing list days is that everyone had their own interpretations, but also that (most) everyone worked to stay respectful of the others. I don't recall discussions getting nasty very often or people being snots about forcing their preferences on the fandom-at-large. Of course, that was a long time ago, so it's possible that my recollection is less than perfect. It was my first, shiny fandom, so I definitely approach it with stars in my eyes.
I can barely imagine a happy outcome from automated matching in FK.
No, I can't see that automated matching would work at all. Part of being respectful lies in recognizing where people's boundaries are, and no AO3 script is going to know that a player simply can't (or won't) write a character the way their recipient understands it.
I'm sorry that you had to go through the experience of a bad match. Both you and PJ are too nice to have had to suffer that. I'm also sorry that the resulting story drove someone away. We all have stories that aren't what they could be, or that aren't "us" (especially when it comes to exchange-written fic, where we may be making an effort to write past our normal boundaries). For a story to run someone out of a potential fandom is a harsh blow.
For this fandom, then, it sounds like hand-matching is definitely a selling point.
no subject
It really is. Fortunately, I managed to carve out a little niche and meet some great people.
FK is the polar opposite. No one agrees about anything in FKdom, hardly even baseline canon. :-)
:) What I remember from my mailing list days is that everyone had their own interpretations, but also that (most) everyone worked to stay respectful of the others. I don't recall discussions getting nasty very often or people being snots about forcing their preferences on the fandom-at-large. Of course, that was a long time ago, so it's possible that my recollection is less than perfect. It was my first, shiny fandom, so I definitely approach it with stars in my eyes.
I can barely imagine a happy outcome from automated matching in FK.
No, I can't see that automated matching would work at all. Part of being respectful lies in recognizing where people's boundaries are, and no AO3 script is going to know that a player simply can't (or won't) write a character the way their recipient understands it.
I'm sorry that you had to go through the experience of a bad match. Both you and PJ are too nice to have had to suffer that. I'm also sorry that the resulting story drove someone away. We all have stories that aren't what they could be, or that aren't "us" (especially when it comes to exchange-written fic, where we may be making an effort to write past our normal boundaries). For a story to run someone out of a potential fandom is a harsh blow.
For this fandom, then, it sounds like hand-matching is definitely a selling point.